Writing, Coffee, and Gravitational Lensing

I’ve reached 5,000 words on money for the story. It really went smoothly today. As I mentioned elsewhere I had a new style of coffee today. Basically I wanted caffeine, but I wasn’t in the mood for coffee nor sugar. I ended up making it about 40% coffee and 60% milk. It worked out great, the flavor was very mild but the effect was no less impactful.

I don’t know what really to talk about today. My mind has been centered around packing and Pokémon. Have you ever heard of gravitational lensing? Rather remarkable thing really. Gravity either flexes the space around it or is the name of what happens to flexed space. Regardless this flexing impacts anything that travels through it, including light.

You might think that this sort of effect is only relegated to single massive celestial objects. I know for me stars was sort of the only thing that ever came to mind. But it turns out we are starting to see some of the oldest galaxies in the known/visible universe by collecting light that is magnified by entire galaxies.

Remarkable really. From what I’ve read these light bending galaxies are far more abundant than predicted by physics. This suggests that somewhere along the way we’ve underestimated some factor that plays into their creation. I don’t want to act like I have any idea what that thing is, I really don’t. For me I just find it wonderful to think of the scope here. An object that is larger than anything we could ever imagine bending amounts of light far greater than we could ever imagine to take us back in time far longer than we could ever imagine.

The most amazing thing is that the numbers themselves to describe all of these immense things are themselves too large for us to imagine or grasp. The universe, nay anything larger than a small store, is so incredibly grand that we couldn’t possibly contain it in any realistic or meaningful way in our minds.

Something humbling about that and most of science. We are constantly manipulating things that we literally cannot comprehend. We can abstractly dictate their functions and use mathematics as a way to “encode” it into something we can more reasonably manage but the actual thing itself is beyond us.

This is why we write things to powers of 10, or use variables, truncating everything everywhere to try and bring it down to numbers small enough for our brains to comprehend. This is also why people can so easily get lost in things like national budgets. It’s all so magnificent that we just can’t do it.